Woodall’s SUDO — submarine distribution officer— was matching noise signatures recorded by the Norwegian PB-3s and the SOSUS hydrophone networks that had not been affected by the electromagnetic pulse that had blacked out NATO’s computers along Europe’s central front. The SUDO tapped the computer’s keys with the unhurried competence born in the nexus of long training, self-confidence, and expertise in state-of-the-art submarine disposition programs. There they were on the monitor: the hitherto white sub signals indicating “vessel country unknown” changed immediately to red, subdivided into “DHs”—diesel hostiles — and “NHs”—nuclear hostiles.
Forty miles ahead of the convoy, the blue wrinkle of sea beneath him glinting with sunlight, one of the Prowlers picked up six blips. Instantly alerted, two ASW Sea King helos peeled out from the fan, racing ahead of the convoy, rotors catching the sun, toward the six blips. Four seconds later Admiral Woodall received coded burst messages from SACLANT, confirmed by Buda, the underground listening bunker in Norway, and by CINCEASTLANT, Commander in Chief Eastern Atlantic, Northwood, England, that the first group of the Russian subs was approaching the GIUK Gap. The six blips on the Prowler’s radar, however, were not coming from the west but from the south, forty miles ahead of the convoy. Admiral Woodall instructed his SUDO to “Code Top Secret to C in C East Atlantic. Where are Soviet minesweepers?”
An integral part of the whole NATO forward fleet flexible response policy at sea was to cause a major “traffic jam” at the GIUK Gaps, literally cutting the Russians off at the pass, buying time for the NATO convoys and forcing the Russians to send in time-consuming minesweepers. Woodall reminded his OOD that when in 1984 one mine layer dropped its load in the Red Sea, it had taken over seventeen minesweepers, eight large helicopters, plus dozens of support vessels from six countries more than three weeks to clear the area. NATO had laid the equivalent of twenty mine layer loads in the GIUK Gaps. Of course, Woodall pointed out, “the Bolshies might send in remote-control metallic barges, four abreast, to detonate the magnetic mines,” but that was easier said than done, and even so, it would still leave hundreds of sound-activated mines already coded to home in and detonate on the noise signature of each Russian ship that would have to pass through the narrow channels. Woodall was anxious to hear just how many minesweepers had been sighted.
As the two Sea King helicopters approached the six blips well ahead of the convoy, they recognized them, with great relief, as Norwegian purse seiners, their high poop decks and nets that are pulled in into the cone-shaped purse quite visible from five hundred feet for a distance of three miles, the Norwegian flags flying stiffly in the breeze as the Sea Kings now descended to make sure, in the words of the Sea King leader, that there was “no bloody hanky-panky.” The fishermen, however, looked positively relieved to see the Sea Kings, their voices on the radio band clearly conveying their alarm at not knowing where they could go. In one sense it seemed a ridiculous question to the crew of the Sea King, the blue expanse of the Atlantic all around, but the fishermen told the pilots that on their way back from weeks at sea since hostilities had begun, they simply did not know which coastal region was safe. The natural answer, of course, would have been to head for Iceland, but despite the NATO Alliance, the Sea King pilots were aware that there’d been some nasty “cod” wars within NATO over fishing rights around Iceland and Greenland, and the fishermen reported that they’d rather head back to Norway if it was possible or attach themselves to the convoy for safe passage. The lead Sea King pilot said he’d have to verify with the convoy commander but told them that meantime they should move over to the eastern flank of the convoy — a polite way of telling the fishermen that the convoy would not alter course for the time being and that Admiral Woodall would not take kindly to any trawlers getting in his way.
“Please,” explained one of the trawlers, “we have yet to bring in our net.”
“All right,” reported the Sea King leader, the helo rising, the fishermen looking fat, their yellow wet gear ballooning in the rotors’ wash. “But you’d better hurry it up.”
Upon returning to the convoy, the pilot was ordered to land his craft on the helicopter carrier ship nearest Admiral Woodall’s destroyer.
Stunned, the pilot was severely reprimanded for breaking radio silence without express authorization from Woodall. The point that messages had been sent to C in C East Atlantic by the admiral himself did not absolve the pilot. The messages sent to C in C East Atlantic were “burst” coded — a matter of milliseconds and of import to the convoy’s safety — while the chatter with the Norwegian trawlers had been long enough for the enemy via satellites and/or listening posts from Murmansk to the North Cape to get a vector fix.
It didn’t do any good for the pilot to explain that, given the low transmission power he’d used, it would have been all but impossible to pick up the exchange with the Norwegians.
“Hell,” complained the pilot to his comrades, “if they don’t know where we are now, their satellites aren’t worth a tinker’s damn.” He looked at his copilot, asking bitterly, “How the hell else should I have communicated with them? By bloody semaphore, for Christ’s sake?”
“Should have lowered down one of our crew,” said the copilot gamely.
The Sea King pilot snorted, went to his cabin furious — at Woodall but mostly at himself.
Of the fourteen submarines in the advance fan screen, four of the nuclear-powered Trafalgars had now sprinted ahead at thirty knots, submerged to a point thirty miles ahead of the convoy. Reducing speed to ten, then five knots, thus eliminating their own noise, they deployed their hydrophone arrays extruded astern like a long tube worm. In neutral buoyancy the subs sat and listened, their computers automatically subtracting any noise they emitted against incoming noise received by the passive radar. Active radar would not be used, as while this would bounce off any other sub and give its precise position to the listening Trafalgars, the Trafalgars themselves would also have been identified as a noise source. In passive mode, however, no noise was sent out by the Trafalgars, their operators listening intently to the noisiest place on earth. The sea’s high density of life gave off a cacophony of sound, everything from the snapping noise of swarms of shrimp to the muted hornlike calls of seals and whales and other mammals. In addition, there was the din of currents in concert, currents in opposition, turbulence of small and enormous mud slides, jets of superheated mineral-rich water steaming out of thousands of vents after traveling through the hot volcanic aquifers far beneath the seafloor interface. One of the loudest noises was that of the plankton which rose with the coming of night and fell with the coming of dawn, their sizzle confounding the sonar operators ever since World War II, when the noise was first heard in the sonar war against the Nazi Wolfpacks. The plankton layer still interfered at times with even the strongest and most sophisticated electronic filters as the billions of microscopic creatures created a massive blanket of sound, distorting all other. In the same way, different density layers that never mixed created, through temperature differentials, warm oases teeming with life in depths once thought uninhabitable.
All this meant that to detect any particular noise, sound moving much more quickly in water from liquid molecule to molecule than in the air, was as much an art as a science for a trained operator. To detect another submarine was as much art as science. One had to develop the feel for the sounds, the ability to eliminate all similar sounds, to sort out one propeller’s cavitation from another, listening carefully on the narrow-band receivers for the SFP — sharp frequency peaks — and on the two-hundred- to two-thousand-hertz band for the “singing” sound of a propeller shaft’s vibrations, these varying within the same ship in proportion to rate of speed, blade shape, and hull curvature — all affecting the overall noise signature. In addition to all these concerns of the sonar operators, the NATO navies were not really sure of the full extent of the damage done by the American Walker spy ring or by Toshiba’s sale of the Toshiba-Konigsberg quiet-propeller-making machine to the Soviet Union. In any event, to find their way through all of this, the sonar operators, of course, needed excellent hearing. It was something that Capt. Robert Brentwood, skipper of the USS Roosevelt, now back on its Norfolk-to-Scotland patrol, made a point of double-checking whenever a new sonar operator was assigned to the sub.